Internet social networks have become a significant phenomenon. Social networks allow an Internet user to create an account and a user profile and interact with other users of the social network. A social network user can share content and interact with content shared by other users. A social network may also offer chat functionality by which users may interact with each other in real-time. Social network users typically assemble a group of friends or followers with whom they interact. Once approved, the “friendship” typically gives both users access to each other's profiles and the content posted on them. Content postings and other user activities may generate stories that are visible to other users. A user may view stories generated by the activities of his friends by accessing their profiles individually or by accessing his news feed, an interface that displays stories from several users and summarizes the activities of the user's friends. Friends can comment on, share, or otherwise interact with each other's stories. In this way, social networks allow users to mimic real-life interactions in the context of an online community.
A social network may provide users with increasingly sophisticated functionality. Early social networks offered little more than a simple interface for users to communicate and post messages. Now users may share different types of content and interact with each other's content in a variety of ways. In addition, as technology has evolved and social network usage has grown, tools for third-party services have been introduced to make their functionality and content available within the social network.
Initially, social network users could only access static content such as text and images, and could do so only using features that were directly provided by the social network. A social network now may allow users to share and interact with dynamic content such as music, videos, and games. In addition to providing such content and functionality themselves, a social network may collaborate with third party entities to bring other popular services to social network users. Many social networks provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow third party entities to deliver their content and functionality through social networking portals. Among these third party entities are digital media providers.